Bertrand Russell’s Inductivist Turkey

A turkey, in an american nurture, decide to shape its vision of the world scientifically well founded (a wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung, according to the Logical Positivism by the Wiener Kreis).

Bertrand Russell – from Wikipedia

The turkey found that, on his first morning at the turkey farm, he was fed at 9 a.m. Being a good inductivist turkey he did not jump to conclusions. He waited until he collected a large number of observations that he was fed at 9 a.m. and made these observations under a wide range of circumstances, on Wednesdays, on Thursdays, on cold days, on warm days. Each day he added another observation statement to his list. Finally he was satisfied that he had collected a number of observation statements to inductively infer that “I am always fed at 9 a.m.”.

However on the morning of Christmas eve he was not fed but instead had his throat cut.

It doesn’t matter how many cases we list during our inductivist reasoning, nothing guarantees that the next case will lay in this inference we deducted from our observations, as the possible experiments and observations are infinite by number and type.

The only valid scientific method is to test the theory using the assertions which can be deduced.

15 thoughts on “Bertrand Russell’s Inductivist Turkey”

The turkey’s failure did not lie in his choice of an inductive approach. It lay in his failure to consider the full ramifications of the problem. He only asked, “When do I get fed?” He never asked, “Why do I get fed?”

If the turkey hadn’t been killed–it would have been fed at 9 AM. I regard Russell (grandson of the British PM Lord John Russell whom he remembered) as a “useful idiot” of the Left and therefore suspect.

Russell was a great mathematician, a pretty good historian, and a fair philosopher. But he was never a scientist, so his pronouncements as to the methods of finding “validity” in science must be a bit suspect. But there is an important point here. The strength of a scientific theory is found not in its ability to explain previous observations, but in its ability to explain new phenomena. Whether to predict the orbits of undiscovered planets or to explain shifts in magnetic field orientations on the ocean floor, a theory is finally accepted when it shows a robust ability to explain (or in retrospect, predict) new observations.

Actually, in British usage, “deducted” might have been more accurate. Watson was forever saying things like, “Clever deduction, Holmes.” In 19th Century England, it was common to refer to a “deduction” as making a conclusion from the gathering of evidence — see also Daffy Duck and Porky Pig in “Deduce, You Say!” in which “Dorlock Homes” is busy “deducting” — on his taxes, that is. That usage was common, but today is incorrect — deductive logic is the logic of the syllogism, and not what we now refer to as induction — as with Russell’s turkey.

It’s a lovely critique of induction, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that there is no role for induction in science. I’m sure there’s a deductivist chicken that can be shown to be equally absurd in the extreme. It’s moving back and forth between the two (in the forms of theory and experimentation) that enables the creation of reliable knowledge.

Welcome!

This is my personal blog, where I write about what I learned, mostly about software, project management and machine learning.
Why this name? The blog should help me to navigate into the future using (and not forgetting) the past experiences.
From Europe to the world.